Today’s story shares in a theme across Old Testament and Gospel stories of feeding, the summer breadbasket of John stories we see in the Markan year B of the lectionary. (Mark is a short Gospel so we get a lot of John during the summer, which focuses on Jesus feeding others.)
Our reading from 1 Kings has a much more familiar backstory and story that follows than the short passage we have today. Prior to this passage, Elijah does battle with the prophets or wizards of Baal. Essentially it is a Baal/ God show down. Of course, God wins, and this infuriates Queen Jezebel (yes, that same Jezebel) who was a Baal follower. She then swears she will make Elijah pay, pay with his very life. After Elijah gets his nourishment in today’s story, he will go to Mount Horeb where he has his encounter with God who you may remember is not in the thunder or rain, or earthquake, but is in the still small voice. Our story today lies between these two episodes.
In today’s story from 1 Kings, an angel makes cakes for Elijah, much as Elijah did for a widow earlier in his story. However, when we are focusing on the eating, we don’t hear this other theme in this story. “Elijah went a day’s journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a solitary broom tree. He asked that he might die: ‘It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.’” Here Elijah has just facilitated God’s glorious victory over Baal, but Elijah is now depressed and wants to die. He clearly doesn’t see himself as other people might. He thinks he is the one surviving prophet of Yahweh, and therefore, that he is useless. What’s the point of going on? This is as close to suicidal thoughts as you get in the Bible. Even if not suicidal, he is decidedly wishing his own demise, and he is clearly clinically depressed. He can’t even get himself out of bed to make himself food.
So, an angel ministers to Elijah and he goes right back to sleep. Anyone who has ever been depressed knows that’s a very real possibility; this happens ALL THE TIME. If the day is too hard, just keep sleeping. So, an angel ministers to Elijah again. Unlike in our culture, no one asks Elijah what is wrong with him, no one finds fault with him, Elijah is taken care of. He is fed and cared for. First a grand story, a battle with false prophets; then a very domestic, ordinary story – an episode of depression and aimlessness. God is present in both; God provides in both.
We tend to fall into thinking of God as concerned only with the great and dramatic; and there are dramatic goods; but God also works in the mundane. You need some sleep and a little nourishment. We all need some sleep and some nourishment. In the ordinary and the extraordinary – and in ordinary and extraordinary ways – as we saw last week, God provides. God is good.
Perhaps you may wonder if there are angels, like the one who tended to Elijah. Perhaps as it is with most things—people have come up with angels as a way to explain things that are not otherwise explainable. This is very similar to what we hear in today’s Gospel reading. Jesus is having a conversation about being born from above, coming from heaven, and the crowd’s quick retort is questioning about his parents, whom they know—these are ordinary people, Mary and Joseph; they can’t have an extraordinary child.
Ages ago people were much more likely to believe in stuff that was not explainable. Personally, I think we spend too much time trying to distinguish between or to separate or to relegate to what we take as two different worlds. There is an “on the ground, earthy sort of world” and then there is a spiritual world. We tend to kind of like to keep them apart.
But Jesus, the bread of heaven, bridges the gap of the heavenly and earthly, the grand and mundane, the world of angels and the world of you and me. Our desire to keep them apart doesn’t work so well when we have Jesus in the picture.
I don’t think that I routinely encounter angels; if I do, I don’t know it. I do know that strange things happen that I can’t explain, and I have come to terms with the fact that I don’t need to explain them. If you’re hoping that I would offer an example, there are all the déjà vu moments in life, but even just life itself, that there is anything at all, is pretty inexplicable. However, our God is relational. In all the metaphoric speech, there is a way to cross over, be it ever so briefly from one world to the other, one dimension to the other. Sometimes our language for this is metaphoric, sometimes not, but language is all we have to try to get at what fails language.
“Taste and see that God is good.”
“This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
“And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption… Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”
“At all times I will bless the Lord; * whose praise shall ever be in my mouth.”
In the ordinary and the extraordinary – and in ordinary and extraordinary ways – as we saw last week, God provides. God is good. Maybe if we quit trying to keep the worlds so separate, trying to keep our God so high and lofty, we can see more of the goodness in the world, and marvel more at what all God has given as gift. We can pause and just be gratefully baffled by it all. We can live as close as we can to what we think God would have us do. We can never discount the possibility of angels. We can never go to sleep angry, we can love each other. We can praise God at all times, joining our voices with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven with praise in our mouths, and in every humble moment of daily life, tasting and seeing that God is good.
Proper 14B, 08-08-2021 SColvin
Track 2
1 Kings 19:4-8 Psalm 34:1-8 Ephesians 4:25-5:2 John 6:35, 41-51